Category Archives: STEM Education and Learning

If you grew up watching The Jetsons, Star Wars, or even WALL-E, at some point, you likely dreamed of having a robot sidekick. How great would it be to have a Rosie of your own, making dinner, folding laundry and basically making your every household chore her cheerful command? No such luck for us grown-ups (yet), but the latest robotic [...]

Humanizing smart robots for the masses Human beings have an uneasy relationship with robots. We’re fascinated by the prospect of intelligent machines. At the same time, we’re wary of the existential threat they pose, one emboldened by decades of Hollywood tropes. In the near-term, robots are supposed to pose a threat to our livelihood, with [...]

It’s a never-ending cycle of testing and troubleshooting. Last weekend was supposed to be Roborace’s big moment. The driverless car championship, which has been under development for about year, was slated to make its first public demonstration in Hong Kong during the season opener of Formula E, an all-electric urban racing series. But developing a self-driving [...]

It’s a powerful gadget in a portable size When action camera maker GoPro unveiled its Karma drone last month, it addressed one of the biggest issues with most high-end drones: Portability. With its foldable legs, the Karma is easier to transport from point A to point B and back again. Just days later, drone maker DJI responded [...]

The Falcon 8+ is an Intel-branded drone built for industrial jobs Intel continues to make inroads into the drone industry, announcing this week the company’s first branded drone for commercial use. The Falcon 8+ system is a complete package designed for “industrial inspection, surveying, and mapping,” and is built around an octocoptermanufactured by Intel subsidiary Ascending Technologies The [...]

WEST Cork Civil Defence Officer Niall Twomey says drones are a ‘game changer’ when it comes to the search for missing persons. Mr Twomey explained that the team’s acquisition of a drone would be of huge assistance to local units in West Cork, offering support to agencies such as An Garda Siochana and the Irish [...]

“There was one in a million chance of this happening.” That’s how North Carolina resident and drone photographer Quavas Hart described the weekend’s unusual sequence of events that led him to help rescue Chris Williams, a man trapped in his flooded home after Hurricane Matthew. Hart became aware of the emergency only because Chris’s brother, who [...]

Researchers at Disney Research in Pittsburgh have built a single-legged hopping robot that can currently bounce around 19 times without falling over. The project by Zachary Batts, Joohyung Kim, and Katsu Yamane began as a computer simulation and finally a hardware product. The researchers based their system on Marc Raibert’s hopping controller and it’s controlled by a linear [...]

The ultimate vertigo test. No, this isn’t another VR headset. These are video goggles from DJI. Why would you want a headset from DJI? Because it connects wirelessly to the company’s new foldable Mavic Pro drone, giving you a live, bird’s eye view from the camera (in 1080p no less). The idea isn’t new, in drone [...]

No one’s ever gotten closer to a hurricane than the Coyote. Whenever a hurricane nears land, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) dispatches several aircrafts to inspect its intensity from the top down. However, since planes carrying passengers can’t get very close to a storm without risking damage, NOAA’s hurricane hunters use the Coyote, [...]